[GW2] Beautiful Things

I’ve always been enamored by the Orr zones in Guild Wars 2. It portrays the whole “epic civilization that was lost” feeling so well. At nearly any point I can turn around and see the ruins of a humongous structure. Trying to imagine it as it once was feels impossible. It feels like I cannot fully appreciate that-which-once-was.

Jeromai is trying to evoke this feeling through an excellent series of posts. Edgar Allen Poe’s The City in the Sea is accompanied by dozens of great landscape shots by Jeromai. It is very well done, and Jeromai’s technique in getting all those landscape shots is quite good given the lack of a first-person landscape camera.

Another Guild Wars 2 fan took a bunch of his favorite screenshots, ran them through Adobe After Effects, and turned out a very peaceful, 2.5D movie. It’s called Moments Suspended in Time. JamesPBUK added a ton of great effects. I would love to see more of this, but with perhaps a wider character selection. I am surprised that more After Effects-loaded pictures haven’t been created by fans given all the 2.5D cinematics in game.

6 thoughts on “[GW2] Beautiful Things”

That’s what gets me the most about Orr, looking around trying to imagine what it was like before the cataclysm, and thinking it is an impossible task to restore that splendour, and all because of one man and a vengeful god. Some of the vistas are still breathtaking, the Promenade of the Gods for example.

Despite there being a personal story that requires a risen-infested Orr, I’d like to see the land becoming more verdant and more settled over time. The personal story can happen in the past, a historical retelling, most of the action happens in instances after all, while the world itself moves on.

No matter the negativity of the community towards Trahearne, I think he is a cool character and I’d love to help him further with his wyld hunt to restore Orr.

Vengeful god? What are you talking about? No god had anything to do with the demise of Orr. Khilbron sank it just before the Charr could invade it while the army was away in the Guild Wars. No god involved, nowhere.

I really dislike Orr. Sure, the theme is really well done, it’s just that I dislike the “ancient, destroyed civilization”-theme in general. On top of that, Orr is to monothematic and anticlimatic to me. There is nothing but the sunken Orr down there, no variation. It makes perfect sense, since the whole peninsula has been sunk, but it still bores me. Same for the fight against chicken, bulls and villagers in the final, supposedly hardest areas of the game – it makes sense, but feels stupid.

And what do you mean helping Trahearne further with his wyld hunt to restore Orr?
***SPOILER***
He’s done, his Wyld Hunt’s over. There’s nothing to do but sit back, relax and watch how the water currents spread his ritual about the whole area of Orr. Zhaitan has been dealth with as well, so all there is to do is cleaning up the remaining risen.
P.S.: I also dislike Trahearne. Won’t bother to elaborate why, there are tons of posts out there that restate the reasons again and again and I’m sure you’ve seen some of them.

Khilbron was a disciple of Abbadon, the forgotten god who was cast out from the original Six. The charr invasion was just a good moment of confusion for him to sneak into the forbidden vaults and use the scrolls to destroy Orr, thus completing Abbadon’s vengeance.

What gets me the most about Orr is thinking about how that place was whole while we were pottering about in Pre-Searing Ascalon. It makes the loss feel more personal than pondering some ruin from a couple of thousand years ago. It’s more like the feeling you get from discovering the ruins of Droknar’s Forge or Granite Citadel.